onflicting promises to Arab nationalists and to Zionists to whom in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 they said they favored the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine on the understanding "that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine . . . " (Ovendale 200). In 1922 Palestine became a British Mandate under the League of Nations, a status it retained until the British washed their hands of the Palestine problem which it handed back to the UN in November 1947. During the Mandate and despite British attempts to restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine, tensions between Jewish settlers and Arab residents escalated. Those tensions intensified after World War II as the pace of Jewish immigration grew in the wake of the Holocaust. Various plans sponsored by the UN and others for the partition of Palestine between Jewish and Arab interests failed to satisfy either side. On May 14, 1948 David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the new State of Israel which was attacked the next day by the armies of its neighboring Arab states.
The Security Council was deeply involved in negotiations to end the 1948 war. It helped broker an armistice between Egypt and Israel in February 1949. It has been involved in arranging cease fires in the three subsequent wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973. Its first major attempt to mediate an end to the 1948 war failed when Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem on September 17 1948 by Jewish terrorists (the Stern Gang). Fanatics on both sides have taken their toll of moderate leaders. For example, in July 1951 Palestinian terrorists murdered Abdullah an Arab moderate and the father of the present King of Jordan, King Hussein. Repeated cycles of violence emanating from extremists on both sides have frustrated efforts to achieve peaceful settlements of the Arab-Israeli dispute, a pattern interrupted only...